Media That Matters

The Beyond Broadcast conference last Saturday, held at MIT, featured a brilliant vision of public media as truly participatory media with a democratic heart, by Henry Jenkins. (He was drawing from his equally brilliant book Convergent Culture, which reminds us among other things that powerful democratic communications tools are often incubated in improbable environments such as fanzines.) Go to beyondbroadcast.net to catch up a little. Read more...

It was a thrill to participate in the workshop on media literacy and Fair Use at the Beyond Broadcast conference [beyondbroadcast.net] last weekend. Henry Jenkins (MIT), Bryan Baker (Temple U) and I brainstormed with about 25 creative media literacy teachers and makers--media arts center managers, profs, after-school programs leaders, filmmakers, bloggers and more. Bryan is part of a team led by Renee Hobbs [renee.hobbs@temple.edu] at Temple's Media Education Lab. They are exploring just what creative problems media literacy teachers and makers face, given what they understand of the law. Read more...

Now MediaPro has joined AIG as insurance companies using the Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use as a guideline to accept Fair Use in its errors-and-omissions insurance policies for documentary filmmakers. MediaPro will depend on Stanford Law School's judgment that documentary filmmakers' uses are within the Statement's principles and conditions. This is great news for documentary filmmakers, and provides new opportunities for insurers as well.

I just spent the first day at the "Public Media Conference" in Boston. This conference, previously called the Public Broadcasting New Media Conference, is a gathering of more than 450 public broadcasters from across the U.S. who discuss and share their experiences with online services and community engagement tools as well as the strategic challenges that lie ahead. Being from Germany and therefore with a somewhat different public broadcasting history, I was curious to learn how the U.S. public broadcasting landscape is evolving around the internet. Read more...

Social documentaries are a great example of media designed for public knowledge and action. The Trials of Darryl Hunt--watch for it on HBO on April 26 and also in theaters this spring--is the latest example of the difference they can make.
Our friend David Magdael, who is publicizing the film, tells the story:
"Darryl Hunt was a 19 year-old black teenager in 1984 when he was wrongfully accused of murdering and raping a white woman in racially divided Winston -Salem, North Carolina. Read more...